The troubles with old computers....
 

As my dad and I went through our garage recently, we came upon 4 boxes of old computer hardware and software, as well as two old computers! We decided to begin an experiment in computer nostalgia and attempt to load original DOS.

When we booted the computer, it seemed to work fine. The CPU was OK, and it found its primary master and slave hard disks. Then it made a really odd clicking noise as it attempted to read from the hard disk, and it then said:

"Primary master hard disk fail"

We managed to boot to the hard disk install floppy, and found that the hard drive had gone bad. We replaced it, and made the other hard disk the primary master. It worked. Hooray! DOS at last! :) Until the next time we booted to attempt to install DOS:

"Floppy disks fail (40)"

NOOOOOOOO!!!

So then we replaced the floppy drive with the one from the other computer, and at last got a DOS prompt. Yes!

But what does "Floppy disks fail (40)" mean? Is there a way to salvage that floppy drive?

P.S. We blew out the floppy drive with one of those cans of compressed air just before it failed. Could that have caused it somehow?

Are you sure it's the floppy drive which failed and not one disc? Dunno about those particular messages, I think in DOS you always got the good old unfathomable "retry, abort, ignore?" message, so maybe they're hardware errors after all.

I guess it all depends on what conditions it had been stored.

It happened with any disk, including known good floppies.

The message appeared on the first screen the computer showed upon being turned on.

The computer had been stored in a closet, and was very gently treated.

The floppy drive we replaced it with came from a computer stored in our garage, which gets very cold sometimes.

Seems like the second one should fail, and the other should be the one that works......

An update...

I finally got PC DOS 7 loaded and used my modern computer to place my collection of DOS games on a CD-RW. However, I need a good univeral CD-ROM driver for DOS, because the floppy that originally contained my driver was lost. Any suggestions will be MOST appreciated.

try this

no personal experiences though

Already tried using Google last night, attempted to load the Oak Technologies driver, setup program gave error message while trying to copy whatever file immediately follows vidde_cd.sys (or whatever that file's called, can't remember exact name).

Try my attachment. I've used it in other machines than the one it came with long ago, including virtual ones, and always worked. It's the full content of the original disc, including an installer, so besides copying the files it will edit config.sys and autoexec.bat for you.

If Japo's doesn't work (which it should), I have one that AFAIK works on everything. :)

I now have the CD drive working (Thanks for the suggestions!). However, now I have three new problems.

1. I can't seem to locate a generic sound card driver.

2. Even after changing the drivers' lines in AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to try to load them into the upper memory area, they STILL load in conventional memory, leaving me with too little to run some games (like Lemmings 2 and 3D.

3. When I attempted to run The Incredible Machine, the screen went black and nothing more happened. Is this perhaps a video driver issue?

1.- Are you sure you need drivers? Isn't it enough to set the "BLASTER" (or equivalent) environment variable?

Which card is it?

2.- Honestly I never finished figuring that out, perhaps someone else will be able to help you. You can always try running memmaker. Or researching in Google, but it's true that saving conventional memory--when possible--isn't so easy as using devicehigh and loadhigh. You need to understand what memory areas are available and what fits there, but don't ask me.

Since the CD-ROM drivers take a lot of memory, back then I used multiple startup configurations, and loaded the CD-ROM drivers only when I needed them. You can create a startup menu with special syntax in config.sys and autoexec.bat.

3.- I remember things like that happening with several games for no particular reason, because PCs were never 100 per cent compatible, and DOS left apps to their own devices when interfacing with hardware--there are no video drivers in DOS usually, not in the OS, each game speaks to your particular video hardware directly; and if they don't happen to understand each other in the least you're screwed.

2 + 3 = why I love DOSBox ^_^